Much was said about energy policy. Sadly, not much of it was all that sensible, but then won’t surprise anyone I suspect.

The government wants to extend the life of the Liddell power station, AGL seems not at all interested in extending the life of Liddell, if Liddell ends up on the sale block, Delta Electricity might be a starter. And between those facts, politics was laid on like thick, rapid-set cement.

Labor wants Barnaby Joyce to step aside until his case is heard by the high court. Joyce won’t step aside. Labor says Joyce is already fighting a byelection even though he’s still in the parliament. Joyce may or not be fighting a byelection but he’s signalled he wants to fight the environment movement, at least the section of it with tax deductibility status, because coal development keeps the lights on and money in wallets.

The economy grew a bit more than expected but wages remain weak, which is what voters tend to notice.

The high court listened to arguments for and against the same-sex marriage postal survey and will deliver its verdict at 2.15pm tomorrow afternoon, just as question time is winding up.

I’m really not at all sure what that means, given I don’t think energy provision is ever 100% reliable, but let’s plough on.

Rather like Labor’s message today, Abbott says energy policy has to have a proper objective.

He contends there has been government failure stemming back to the Howard era, with successive governments being focused on reducing emissions rather than on energy security.

Just by the by: Abbott seems very focused in the interview about the importance of keeping the lifts moving. He says lifts have to keep moving and he says it more than once. Perhaps he’s focused on having to run to a division.

Abbott also does a bit of front running on same-sex marriage. Abbott says if the high court throws out the postal plebiscite in its judgment tomorrow, then the government needs to bring back its original compulsory plebiscite proposal back to the Senate, not allow a free vote.

I strongly suspect that’s what will happen in the first instance in the event the court causes grief, so nice to put yourself on the probability spot.

He’s also asked about banning the burqa. Abbott can’t quite bring himself to go full Hanson but he creeps, furtively, in that direction. He thinks perhaps we need to consider banning the burqa in public “places upholding Australian values”.

Like courts.

I thought courts upheld the law but maybe I’m just being too literal. It’s an occupational hazard.

The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, has compiled a list of the number of times governments have released advice from the solicitor general since 1984. This somewhat arcane-sounding exercise relates to the issue Labor has been pushing all week: the legitimacy of Barnaby Joyce remaining in the cabinet and in the parliament.

Labor has been asking the government to release the legal advice which has provided the confidence that Joyce is fine to remain where he is. The prime minister has said in response, don’t be silly, governments don’t release private legal advice.

If we were fact-checking this statement, we’d have to correct the prime minister to say governments don’t release private legal advice very often.

According to Dreyfus, here’s the times legal advice has been released under the Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments.

In 2016, the Turnbull government released the solicitor general’s advice on the eligibility under section 44 of Rodney Culleton.

In 2011, the Gillard government released two opinions of the solicitor general on the impact of the high court’s ruling on the Malaysia solution.

In 2010, the Gillard government released the solicitor general’s advice on the Speaker’s position in the House of Representatives following the return of the hung parliament.

In 2009, the Rudd government released legal advice of the solicitor general as an annexure to the National Human Rights Consultation Report.

In 2000, the Howard government released the solicitor general’s advice about amendments to the Ministers of State Act and remuneration of parliamentary secretaries.

In 1999, prime minister Howard tabled in parliament the advice of the solicitor general on the application of section 44 to Warren Entsch, to respond to assertions that he was disqualified.

In 1995, the Keating government released the solicitor general’s advice on payment of legal expenses of members of parliament.

In 1991, the Hawke government released the solicitor general’s advice on judges’ tax.

In 1984, the Hawke government released the solicitor general’s advice on the extent of the parliament’s constitutional power to remove high court justice Lionel Murphy.

I know a number of readers have been moving back and forth between our live coverage of the high court hearing on the same-sex marriage postal plebiscite and Politics Live – so if you already know this, apologies ...

We will get a decision from the high court on the legality of the postal ballot at 2.15pm tomorrow.

Set your alarm clocks. Good of the court to punt that one into question time.

'We will have to take these people on' – Joyce on environmental groups with tax-deductible gift recipient status

I also need to track back to a speech the deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce made early this morning at the Minerals Council of Australia knees-up.

Barnaby Joyce at the Minerals Council of Australia’s minerals week seminar in the theatre of Parliament House on Wednesday morning. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

The speech is a typical Joyce outing – it winds and twists and digresses – but there are some interesting chunks.

There were fighting words against environmental groups with tax-deductibility status campaigning against projects like Adani. As you read on it’s good to bear in mind the mining industry also wants to curb their behaviour.

Barnaby Joyce:

We will just have to take people head on. Those people collecting the tax deductibility to fight us, take them head on, and start selling back to the Australian people the economic message “this is how you are actually going to survive, this is how you are going to win as a nation”.

If you like hospitals that are payed for out of the public purse, if you like schools that are paid for out of the public purse, if you like to be defended as a nation paid for out of the public purse, if you like the roads and the freeways and the tunnels paid for out of the public purse, if you like to go to the Opera House and see all of the cultural events, a lot of them subsidised by the public purse then you’ve got to have an economy that creates a public purse.

They could, all she has to do is move to Singapore, and it stops then. And then Singapore gets the money. And what about the tax that BHP, that Rio’s paid? These ‘terrible’ people paying all this tax, supporting all the infrastructure in our nation.

Sometimes they try and inspire a guilt complex for something but overwhelmingly the sustenance of our nation is determined by our primary exports, by our mineral exports. We’ve got to push back, we’ve got to sell that message.

Now speaking of pushing back, the Adani project ... and the mining industry versus environmentalists, who I think become crocodiles by the end.

Barnaby Joyce:

Galilee Basin, we’re in the fight of our lives trying to open up a mechanism to provide wealth for this nation, this is total insanity. What is the next precinct? And when you say to these people, ‘OK if you don’t want that wealth what is your alternative?

‘What do you wish to put on the table? Where does this fantasia come from? Where is the wealth? If you don’t like coal, you don’t like iron ore or you don’t like the live cattle trade or you think that the sheep industry is “evil”.’ And I’ve seen this before because at the start we were involved with it a little bit with the timber industry.

I watched them close it down, I watched them close it down. So don’t think they can’t, they can. And they’ll pick you off one by one. The biggest mistake you make is you think you’re the fastest runner in the crocodile pen, you’re not, the crocodile will get you, and it’s just which one?

If you’ve been riding along with the live coverage all this week, you’ll know that the government’s package appeared, then disappeared, as the back and forth between various protagonists stalled.

It looks like the process is moving again. The key crossbench player, the Nick Xenophon Team, are now back at the table with the government.

Nick Xenophon:

The government put a proposal to us earlier today and we look forward to discussing that with them later today. I understand the opportunity here to strengthen large and small media companies in Australia – and the role of journalists in our democracy – and I will do my very best to make sure that opportunity is not lost.

(The sticking point has been the tax treatment of small independent publishers).

It was like being flogged with a wet lettuce

Malcolm Turnbull is blasting away at Labor on energy and on its lack of commitment to blue-collar workers. He says it’s time to focus on issues which matter.

Malcolm Turnbull:

We should be focused today on energy policy, as we have been throughout this question time and what we’ve had from the opposition instead is these big threats of creating chaos and mayhem in the parliament.

An absolutely swingeing question time strategy. We felt battered by it over here. It was like being flogged with a wet lettuce.

For years the Labor party has failed Australians on energy and now when we see the result, when the facts are laid out by Aemo, the Labor party is not even prepared to discuss it.

Those are the issues we should be discussing. That’s why this motion should be rejected. We have urgent matters of energy security to deal with in this House. That’s what we should be addressing today.

No coal Joel

Down in the House, the prime minister is participating in the debate about the suspension of the standing orders.

Malcolm Turnbull rounds on Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon, who contributed last in debate. Fitzgibbon represents the Hunter region in NSW, a coalmining region.

Malcolm Turnbull:

He has abandoned the workers at Tomago! Why he has abandoned the workers who elected him? Why this old boy of Cessnock high school, whose magazine is called the Black Diamond, suddenly become no coal Joel?

Meanwhile, in the red place

Christopher Knaus

Oh dear. It’s only Wednesday and the attorney general, George Brandis, has already lost his voice. Brandis was oh-so-close to making it through question time without drawing it to attention. But he’s forced to get to his feet in the last moments, offering a raspy, barely audible request that “further questions be placed on the notice paper”.

It draws a rather charitable response from the other side. Labor’s leader in the Senate, Penny Wong, says: “I hope the attorney gets better. I did promise him we wouldn’t ask him a question today because he was ill and we honoured our promise.”

But the game is ruined by the Senate president, Stephen Parry, who asks Brandis to respond to a question on notice about disaster relief payments, which was asked yesterday. “Senator Brandis, are you going to attempt again?” Parry asks.

Wong cries: “Oh come on that’s not fair!”

Brandis makes a noble attempt to get through two short sentences to table the answer. Those opposite are impressed.

Doug Cameron: “Can I just congratulate senator Brandis for that valiant effort, well done.”

The ceasefire is short-lived. A few moments later, Cameron is calling the government an incompetent “rabble” on energy policy.

Burke says the government is risking a lot by allowing Barnaby Joyce to remain where he is.

He suggests that the government dropped its collective bundle when it became known that Joyce was a dual citizen of New Zealand.

Tony Burke:

If you date back to the moment the deputy prime minister first stood there and told us about his New Zealand citizenship, since that moment the government’s become increasingly whacky.

Since that moment, this government has lurched from one conspiracy theory to the next.

I don’t know what was unleashed in the minds of those opposite from the moment we heard about the New Zealand citizenship of the deputy prime minister but from that moment we heard about the New Zealand conspiracy, the Cuban conspiracy, East Germany. The Berlin Wall. We heard from socialism and communism and Stalinism and the secret agent leader of the opposition conspiracy.

Those opposite have gone into the most ridiculous spiral of self-satire since the moment that the deputy prime minister let it be known that he was a citizen of another country.

Tony Burke says the government needs to produce the legal advice it is relying on to say Joyce is eligible to remain in the parliament.

It is not simply the prime minister’s reputation which hangs on the strength of that advice. The entire legitimacy of this government hangs on the strength of that advice.

This is a government that claims to have a majority of one and has become the first government in the history of Australia that has gone to the high court to ask whether or not it is true that they in fact have a lawful majority. First time that has ever happened in the history of our country.

Labor calls on Barnaby Joyce to stand aside

The House calls on the deputy prime minister to stand aside from cabinet until doubts about his constitutional and qualifications have been resolved.

Even the prime minister wasn’t listening to a word of that answer.

Even the prime minister was turning his back on the deputy prime minister. When you are in a situation where you are off campaigning in your electorate, where you are campaigning in the byelection, when the prime minister himself is turning his back on you when you are giving an answer, it is time to acknowledge it is time to go. Time to stand aside.

It is time for this deputy to realise it is no small matter when the constitution says you probably shouldn’t be here.